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10 Mitt Romney Scandals That Shouldn’t Be Forgotten

Although Mitt Romney has been running for president of the United States for about six years, voters are still missing much critical information about his past. Perhaps owing to Americans’ short attention spans, many of the most controversial stories concerning the Republican nominee have hardly been examined — while the mainstream media obsessed over the gaffe-filled, clown-car elements of the 2012 campaign. The result is an incomplete picture of the man who could be Commander-in-Chief.

What follows are 10 troubling stories from Mitt Romney’s past, all of which have been reported by the media — and subsequently forgotten by all but the most ardent political observers.

Posthumous Baptisms
One of the oddest — and some would say most offensive — practices of the Mormon Church is posthumous baptism, in which deceased members of other faiths are baptized as Latter Day Saints so that they can get into heaven.

When Newsweek asked Romney in 2007 if he had preformed baptisms for the dead, Romney responded: “I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.”

One of the posthumous baptisms that the Romney family performed was on his father-in-law, Edward Davies — despite the fact that Davies was a staunch atheist who considered religion to be “drudgery” and “hogwash.”

Profiting From 9/11
Romney’s involvement with an insurance startup called Endurance Specialty Holdings has largely been forgotten among the wave of questionable business deals that have come to light during the presidential campaign.

Endurance Specialty Holdings was designed to purchase debt from insurance companies that suffered huge losses in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. According to a report by Politicker’s Hunter Walker, Romney was invested in the company through Golden Gate Capital — a private equity firm started by one of his former colleagues at Bain Capital — and CCG Investment Fund, LP. By the end of 2003, Endurance Specialty Holdings was reporting a net income of over $263.4 million.

Sensitive to charges that he had profited from the 9/11 tragedy, the Romney campaign insisted that the Republican nominee had no control over his investments, as they were managed by a blind trust — an institution that Romney himself famously described as an “age-old ruse.”

Potential Voter Fraud
In 2010, Romney voted for Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts’ special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy. To prove his Bay State residency, Romney claimed that he was living in his son Tagg’s unfinished basement — which seems unlikely for a quarter-billionaire with multiple houses of his own.

If Romney was lying about his residency, it would constitute voter fraud, a crime punishable by up to five years in jail. Commission of that particular felony would be highly ironic, given the extreme lengths to which Romney’s own party has gone to root out alleged election fraud.

Some observers, like M.S. Bellow Jr. of The Guardian, have speculated that Romney refuses to release his 2009 tax return because it lists an address other than Tagg Romney’s Belmont, Massachusetts home. The vote-fraud story has mostly gone unnoticed by the mainstream media, however.

Profiting From Disposal Of Aborted Fetuses

Another of Romney’s questionable Bain deals that has gone underreported is the firm’s profitable investment in the medical waste disposal firm Stericycle. Bain Capital sank $75 million into the company in 1999 — an odd investment for a staunchly anti-abortion Republican to make. After all, Stericyle has long been attacked by right-wing groups for disposing of aborted fetuses.

The investment raises serious doubts about Romney’s stated timeline of his exit from Bain Capital. Before Mother Jones’ David Corn broke the Stericycle story, Romney claimed that he had fully left Bain in February of 1999. The SEC documentation of the Stericycle deal proved that wrong, however, prompting Romney surrogates to explain that he had “retroactively retired” from the company in 2002.

Had the story garnered more attention, it could have irreversibly damaged Romney’s credibility regarding his business record.

Trying To Block A Lifesaving Abortion
In 1990, Judith Dushku — a professor at Suffolk University in Boston and the mother of actress Eliza Dushku — published an article recounting the story of a 41-year-old woman who had developed a life-threatening blood clot during her sixth pregnancy. While she was at the hospital to undergo the abortion that she needed to survive, her bishop — one Mitt Romney — showed up unnannounced and tried to stop her from going through with it.

According to Dushku, Romney and the woman had the following conversation:

He said – What do you think you’re doing?

She said – Well, we have to abort the baby because I have these blood clots.

And he said something to the effect of – Well, why do you get off easy when other women have their babies?

And she said – What are you talking about? This is a life-threatening situation.

And he said – Well what about the life of the baby?

And she said – I have four other children and I think it would be really irresponsible to continue the pregnancy.

Dushku says that after she went public with the story, Romney — who was once a friend of hers — cut off all contact with her.

If anyone still doubts Romney’s true position on abortion, this story makes his real attitude abundantly clear.

Still Hiding Those Tax Returns (And That Over-stuffed IRA?)

The broader story of Romney’s financial history has gone largely unquestioned since he released two years of tax returns and a summary of tax rates from the previous 20 years in late September. The media is wrong to let Romney off the hook on this topic, however: voters still don’t know what rates Romney paid from 1990-2009 (if he paid any taxes at all,) or how his IRA grew to such massive proportions, among many other unanswered questions.

Potentially Violating Ethics Laws (With Paul Ryan’s Brother)
Throughout Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts, the state did frequent business with a marketing company called Imagitas. The company, which was run by former Bain employees Tom Beecher and Tobin Ryan — brother to Romney’s running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan — had been started based on loans from Bain while Romney was still running the company. When it was sold in 2005, Bain — from which Romney still makes a massive amount of money through dividends, interest, and capital gains — tripled its original stake.

Did Romney violate ethics laws by steering contracts towards a company in which he had a financial stake? Nobody knows. Romney never filed disclosure forms detailing in which individual companies Bain Capital held investments, and he and his campaign have refused to answer questions about his financial connection to Imagitas.

His Son’s Connections With A Ponzi Scheme
In 2009 Tagg Romney, Mitt’s eldest son, partnered with several North Carolina investors who are facing a lawsuit in connection to the $8 billion Stanford Financial Group Ponzi scheme, the second largest such scam in history behind only Bernie Madoff’s. Tagg helped these investors form a new company — called Solamere Advisors, a similar title to Romney’s own Solamere Capital — shortly after Allen Stanford was arrested for his crimes.

As Lee Fang reported in The Nation, Tagg Romney then falsely claimed to reporters that Solamere Capital had no involvement with Solamere Advisors — likely because Mitt Romney has invested about $10 million of his own money into his son’s business.

Profiting From The Auto Bailout — While Jobs Were Shipped To China
Although Romney infamously declared that the federal government should “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” the self-described “son of Detroit” profited handsomely off the auto bailout.

As Greg Palast reported in The Nation, Romney and his wife made millions off an auto parts company called Delphi after it was bought for pennies on the dollar by Romney’s partner (and one of his primary campaign donors) Paul Singer. Singer and his partners took billions in federal bailout dollars in exchange for continuing to supply auto parts to General Motors and Chrysler. They kept the money, stiffed the company’s pensioners, and moved 25 of Delphi’s 29 plants to China.

The White Horse Prophecy

In 1843, Joseph Smith supposedly prophesied that “You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed… It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber,” until Latter Day Saints ride in on a metaphorical white horse to save the Constitution and take control of the government.

Although Romney has publicly stated that he does not believe in the prophecy, many Mormon political figures have used language evoking it, raising the question of how much of Romney’s support within his Mormon base is actually based on an obscure religious doctrine. In Nevada, a closely-fought swing state that is home to many Mormons, ABC News reported last month that LDS church officials had distributed a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation urging church members to register and vote “with one voice” — an appeal that came very close to violating the church’s tax-exempt status, which prohibits partisan activity.

Photo credit: AP/Evan Vucci, file

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Excerpt: 'Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons From A Misunderstood Founder'

Engraving of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill

Screenshot

What follows is an excerpt from Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons From A Misunderstood Founder, a fresh look by Christian Parenti at one of the most important but least discussed works by the American founder and first Treasury Secretary. It is offered with the permission of Verso Books.

The modern United States has a strange relationship with Alexander Hamilton.

We recognize him as the architect of our financial system, but we ignore what he wrote about manufacturing and the real economy in which goods and services are actually produced and consumed.

In particular, Hamilton's magnum opus, his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, is almost totally ignored by economists, historians, development specialists, and biographers. Though it is rarely studied in the United States, the Report's influence is appreciated throughout the developmentalist states of East Asia. Fittingly, the Report also contains the earliest published use of the word "capitalist."

Far from being a free marketeer, Hamilton favored a strong federal government that taxed, spent, borrowed, invested, and most of all planned. For Hamilton, a secure future depended on an activist government, powerful military, and robust, nationally integrated economy based on manufacturing. In place of Smith's "invisible hand," Hamilton saw the hand of government. The economy would not, in fact, develop all on its own "as if guided by an invisible hand." Rather, it had to be clearly and deliberately guided.

Government economic activity would provide "the means of promoting such as will tend to render the United States, independent on foreign nations, for military and other essential supplies." Hamilton called his specific recommendations for government economic action to jump-start and assist development of manufacturing "the Means proper." That phrase should be as ubiquitous in American history as "checks and balances," yet it has remained obscure.



Hamilton's ideas would be called the "American School." Then, in the 1820s under the leadership of the Kentuckian Henry Clay, they came to be known as the "American System." Taken up by the economist Friedrich List and brought to Germany, they morphed into the "National System." These ideas helped shape the late-19th -century industrialization of Germany and then Japan, and a century later the industrialization of South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Today, they guide the world-transforming rise of China. Indeed, Hamilton's Report on Manufactures is the basic policy blueprint followed by most other successfully industrialized countries.

Hamilton's defensive developmentalism, though in no way socialist, nonetheless had an anti-imperialist or at least post-colonial tinge, and in that regard anticipated some of the challenges later faced by the socialist experiments of the 20th century.

A more symmetrical comparison can be drawn between Hamilton's project and that of the 19th-century South American revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar. Like Hamilton, Bolívar was a liberal nationalist with a political vision of continental scale, rooted in the quest for development, sovereignty, and a strong central government. As Joshua Simon put it, "Bolívar's constitutional thought, especially his views on the separation of powers and on the role of the executive in a republic ... compare well with those of the early American republic's High Federalists, especially Alexander Hamilton." Bolívar's project fragmented, and in Latin America economic development was delayed and distorted by outside powers.

There is a perception, a latent, often unspoken assumption, that the United States was inevitably bound for high standards of living and political stability, while the states of Latin America were always and only destined for instability and underdevelopment. That perception not only smacks of racism, it is wrong on both counts. There was nothing inevitable about the formation of the United States. The pessimistic warnings of The Federalist Papers could have become reality.

Hamilton's dirigiste economic theories emerged first from his experiences in the Revolutionary War. As a member of Washington's staff, Hamilton got a bird's-eye view of the new nation's poverty, corruption, and near-catastrophic disorganization. Then during the "Critical Period," the postwar economic slump and political crisis of the 1780s, Hamilton saw the new nation sliding toward civil war, fragmentation, foreign invasion, and re-colonization.

As a man of the state—soldier, politician, then bureaucrat—he was materially bound to it and thus worked to create a political structure that tied various economic interests to the new government. His fortune was linked to that of the state: call him homo publicus. National survival was his desideratum.

The tripartite circuitry of Hamilton's nationalism cast sovereignty as dependent on national defense. National defense was dependent on the capacities of a professional standing army, which was, in turn, dependent on the wealth and technological sophistication of a manufacturing-based national economy. And that sort of economy, which did not yet exist in 1790, could only be created with the active guidance and support of a powerful central state. Thus, the state was both means and end. A weak state, in this logic, is the path toward economic underdevelopment and permanent dependence.

Or as Hamilton put it in Federalist 11: "If we continue united, we may counteract a policy so unfriendly to our prosperity in a variety of ways. By prohibitory regulations, extending, at the same time, throughout the States, we may oblige foreign countries to bid against each other, for the privileges of our markets." Here, Hamilton illustrates the essence of economic nationalism: The state does not merely react to economic conditions; it creates them. Hamilton's political economy was a defense against European imperialism, a form of postcolonial pragmatism. The young nation's choice was to either build a strong manufacturing-based economy or face disintegration. The mission was, in short, development or death.

Although our current world bears little resemblance to the 18th century, some parallels exist. After the Revolution the new nation slipped into a dangerous, multifaceted crisis. Political and economic collapse seemed imminent. Yet the framers managed to produce significant political and economic transformations that stabilized the situation, and the early republic avoided social breakdown, political fragmentation, and foreign domination. The society produced by the Constitution and the developmentalist state it empowered was never fair, or just, or ideal. But it was relatively stable and capable. If its mission was expansionist, racist, exploitative, its methods were at least functional and effective in their own terms. Many states are born of hierarchical and bigoted agendas. But not all succeed.

Like that first generation of Americans, we contemporary Americans also face a multi-faceted crisis. Ours takes the form of massive and growing class inequality, a pandemic, anthropogenic climate change, and the inability of laissez-faire ideology to address them. Failure to face these realities will, in the long run, mean almost certain violent social breakdown. Addressing climate change hinges upon, among other things, a total transformation of the world's energy sector. We must euthanize the fossil fuel industry and build out clean energy technologies and infrastructure. This means fossil fuel sector deindustrialization coupled with a simultaneous green re-industrialization and progressive re-regulation of the economy.

In short, we must execute a radical and sweeping economic transformation. In facing that task, we could do worse than to consult our own history. Hamilton's Report on the Subject of Manufactures, born in the shadow of an impending crisis, was, after all, a plan for radical and rapid economic transition. If we must now re-industrialize, then let us consider how America first industrialized. What forces drove the transition from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy? The actual historical record reveals surprising facts, central among these the very active role of government in guiding economic change. Indeed, the developmental state begins to appear not as something new and foreign, but rather as something old and indigenous.

Christian Parenti is Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College, CUNY. His latest book Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder, from which this essay is excerpted, has just been published by Verso.

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